


Fever Dreams

by TheSigyn



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 17:46:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4531248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're in love with pain." Set season two, after What's My Line.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fever Dreams

  
    Vampires can’t be killed. They always said that. Vampires are immortal, eternal, indestructible. Unless they are reduced to dust, there is no injury, no wound, no illness that can kill them. Nothing the demon cannot, eventually, magically, heal.

    But they can be hurt. And Spike was hurting. Spike was _hurting_ more than he’d ever been hurt before.

    He flickered in and out of consciousness, occasionally aware of Drusilla by his bedside. She’d bring him cats, or rats, or toddlers, and he couldn’t eat. The pain made it impossible. Firing his dead flesh with fever, shooting through his back, growing through his skin, burning through his immobile legs – if they were dead, why couldn’t they just _be_ dead? There were times he even asked himself that question.

    Why couldn’t _he_ just be dead?

    “ _Because I’m not through with you, yet_ ,” the pain told him.

    “And you take delight in torture?” Spike asked. “I thought that was the province of the vampire.”

    “There are different ways and means of torturing,” the pain said. She slid into view across the room like a specter and crawled onto the bed with him, lying down over his legs as if she were a lover. The pain bore down, and he grunted, unable to pretend it away.

    “Stop it.”

    “I can’t stop,” the pain said. “I don’t want to stop. It’s not my job to stop. I’m supposed to keep hurting you... and hurting you... and there’s nothing either of us can do about it.”

    “I could kill you,” Spike snarled. “I’m meant to kill you.”

    “Then reach down and catch me,” the pain whispered. “Catch me up by the throat and squeeze the pain away. Do you think you can do that?” She lifted her head and gazed up at him, a sinister smile on her red lips. “Do you really think you have the power to kill me, to end what I have done to you? Isn’t it beautiful? Doesn’t it make you sing with envy? That I can do this thing, that you can do, that you are meant to do. I can torment. I can torture. I can catch up my enemies and creep deep into them, work into their blood and burn them from the inside.” She caressed his hip, and the pain sparked, lighting bolts shooting up his nerves. He cried out.

    “Isn’t it magical, the things I can do to you?” she asked. “There is this... of course....” she undulated sensuously over his legs, and he groaned with the burning ache of neurological agony. The nerves had been damaged when the organ collapsed on him, breaking his spine, and the demon was growing them back... slowly. Too bloody slowly. “But it’s the little things you can’t fix that make it a slow... burning... hell.” She crawled up over him – her leaving did not ease the pain in his legs – and straddled his hips. They ached, a bone deep ache, as he couldn’t change position on the bed, and he wasn’t often lucid enough to beg Drusilla to shift him. They’d been still too long, and they were suffering. She sat back and writhed, as if in the throes of ecstasy, and he gritted his teeth as the ache deepened. “This, for instance,” she whispered.

    “Go to hell.”

    She reached her arms down and slid them beneath his hips, onto his lower back, where a bedsore was slowly forming. She scratched him there, and it felt as if chunks were being torn from his flesh. “But don’t you love my touch? Didn’t you seek me out? Over and over and over again, seeking me out, for decades?”

    “This wasn’t what I meant!” he snarled.

    “You don’t get to choose,” the pain said, a wicked gleam in her jade eyes. “You made yourself my disciple. You used me as your whore. You passed me off to victim after victim, always enjoying my gifts, the blood I gave you, the screams I bought for you, the tears I drew out for you to taste. You spend a century exploiting me as your own personal property, and now you think you can dismiss me at will?” She leaned forward and scratched down his sides. More lightning bolts of nerve pain shot up his back, and he grunted with it. “No, my sweet William. You’re mine. You’re all mine, now. You’ve always been mine.”

    “Let me go!”

    “I won’t do that,” she said. “You know I won’t.” She crept over him until she got to his throat, and kissed and bit until she reached bone. Each vertebra, as he was confined to the bed, unable to stretch and move as usual, ached more as she gnawed at them through his flesh. He cringed away from it, or tried to, but she held him down. He couldn’t escape her.

    “Let me up and fight me proper, you bitch.”

    “I am fighting you properly,” she said. “This is what I do. This is what I am. You’ve known me since the beginning. I was there with you, as Dru took you. I kissed you, as you died in her arms. I’ve been following you your whole life, your constant companion. You claim now I don’t have the right to make love to you?” She bit and scratched at his arms, and they jolted lightning bolts into his shoulders, more pain.

    “Please, stop. Please.” The pain had drawn tears.

    She pounced on them, as Spike was always wont to do with his victims – the pretty ones, that he liked to make cry. She kissed them away and a deep ache started in his head, behind his eyes, making everything worse. “Oh, you’re so easy, my pet,” she told him. “I knew you were my lover the moment I met you. Bad little boy, distracted in school, just a few little fights with the bigger boys in the schoolyard – the fights you always lost. Defending the girls, avenging the insults to your mother. Caned properly, like bad little boys should be. No fighting. Don’t think of it. Focus on the gentle, the beautiful, and serene. Leave the violence in the headmaster’s chamber. Be a good boy. You learned it well, didn’t you. But I knew you’d come back to me.” She kissed the burns on the side of his head, licking sensuously at his flesh. The burns flared. “You’ll always come back to me.”

    “Leave me the hell alone!”

    “Why, Spike.” It was Drusilla’s voice. “A girl can only do so much.”

    Spike opened his eyes. She vanished, the pain, but her kisses remained, burning him, aching deep in him. “Dru... love....” He was still vague, still half asleep. He swallowed. “Tell me you have something for the pain.”

    Dru shook her head. “But I’ve brought you a snack,” she said. She offered him another cat. Nausea shook him, and he turned his head away.

    “You won’t get strong if you won’t eat, Spike,” she said.

    “Take it away.”

    He didn’t know if he meant the cat, or the pain.

    “Time to move you,” she told him, letting the cat slip onto the floor. She took him by the arm and turned him to his side, propping him with pillows so he didn’t roll right onto his back again. He wished he could be grateful for it – it did take the weight off his bedsores – but moving hurt so badly. He screamed, and Dru cringed – and not altogether unpleasantly, he knew. She did, at some level, always take delight in hurting him. “Pain lies, Spike,” she told him. She kissed him sensuously and then left him alone again.

    The pain curled up warm behind his back, her arm over his torso, and she kissed and kissed and kissed at his sore neck. “There. You see? She left you with me. Even Dru knows you’re meant to be with me,” she said. She rubbed sensuously at his stomach, the nausea growing more intense, and her fingers trailed up his chest, drawing it into his jaw. He retched – fortunately there was no blood left in his stomach – but the tension sent shocking bolts of pain through him. As each spasm hit, the pain moaned behind him, gasping, crying out, as if in ecstasy. “Oh! Oh, Spike! You see what do to me? What I can do to you!”

    “Get off me, you sodding bitch!” he said through gritted teeth.

    She ran her fingers down his arm – more lightning bolts – and slid her leg sensuously over his – the burning ache intensified. It was too much. He screamed, and she laughed with delight, as if she’d just made him come. “That’s it, lover,” she said. “You know who you belong to.” She rolled over him completely and kissed him, deeply, passionately, and this time, for a brief moment, it felt _good_. The burning and the aching and the spasms and the nausea and the headaches and the sores and the weakness and the fear, they all poured into this kiss, and they were part of him, and of him, and she was made for him. He embraced her, pulled her close, made her part of him, accepted her completely... and for that moment, the pain didn’t ease, but it felt _right_.

    He could never make it last, though.

    She pulled away and smiled at him, her blonde hair shining in the light of the candles. Glowing.

    “And you thought you could just kill me,” Buffy said.

    Spike opened his eyes again, properly awake this time, his breath shaky with pain. “Dru?” he called out, half remembering she’d been there a minute ago. “Dru?”

    Dru had left again. He didn’t blame her. He wished he could leave, too. The pain dragged him over coals, and annoyingly, he was hard as a rock, and there was nothing he could do about it, either. His body couldn’t have withstood the shock of an orgasm, even if he’d had the wherewithal to seek one out. The arousal was a known issue, he’d heard, as his demonic body tried to use his blood to heal his spine, sending extra to the area. But these fever dreams were getting out of hand. He thought they came about because of the arousal – not the other way around – but it didn’t matter. They were becoming chronic.

    He just wished he could give the pain the face of someone _other_ than the one who had put him there. That wretched, blond, terrible, torturous, aching, magnificent _slayer._


End file.
